Friday, August 03, 2007
Nakata Q&A in The Japan Times
About two weeks ago I mentioned conducting an interview with director Nakata Hideo (see my July 22 entry). The interview is in today's issue of The Japan Times as well as online. I didn't realize that for the past few years JT has also published a free 2-leaf (8-page) edition on Thursday nights which contains their film coverage.
The Q&A is running next to Mark Schilling's review of Kaidan, which I believe is the first English language review to be published. I think it's pretty spot-on (I might even give it 4 stars -- I want to see it again). Though it made me laugh that he sees lead character Shinkichi (kabuki actor Onoe Kikunosuke, who I think is a real casting coup) as getting a "raw deal." Yes, his fate is cursed but come on -- this cad causes considerable calamity through his appetite for women, and theirs for him.
It's also funny that mentions of The Ring 3 keep popping up in the media...blame it on imdb perhaps.
The upcoming projects are interesting. When he mentioned remaking The Entity, my mind zipped back to the days of VHS in the 80s and images of a young Barbara Hershey being raped by a ghost. Inhuman sounds like a good one, too. American writer Eric Heisserer has partially based his script on a real Tokyo murder case (which one, I don't know). See Hollywood Reporter's article from June here. And we of course have L to look forward to. The Death Note films are cool (and considered dangerous material in China, apparently).
Thanks to Nakata-san for being such a gracious interviewee after landing in Japan and going location scouting that same morning (!) and saving me the trouble of doing the interview in Japanese -- his English is excellent.
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